About Ariel Sommer

Ariel combines an encyclopedic knowledge of music with a sharp instinct for creative ideas and film-making. Not only is he quick to understand a brief and answer it but he’ll often throw in a few nice surprises too.

— Sam Oliver - Group Creative Director, Apple

Ariel's life has always revolved around music. He was given a classical music education learning the piano and the violin. His grandmother was a pianist, his father a cellist and conductor and his mother studied at the Music Conservatory in Paris.

Graduating from Edinburgh University in 1997, Ariel began a career working with artists, as a product manager at Universal Music. He marketed a range of acts including Shaggy, Mary J. Blige, Sting, Marilyn Manson, The Black Eyed Peas, Sophie Ellis Bextor, and Erykah Badu. Three of his six years at Universal were spent helping to break acts in the Italian market.

He completed an MBA at U.C Berkeley in 2006 and went to work for Sony Music in New York, with responsibilities for formulating and driving the label’s U.S digital strategy. There, he launched the first direct-to-consumer artist fanclub for Alicia Keys and worked on setting up a new publishing label. Returning to London in 2008, he headed up Sony’s digital sales activities across Europe. He led the label’s transition from physical to digital, working closely with the likes of iTunes and Spotify.

With a keen desire to return to the creative side of the industry, Ariel started music supervising with UK ad agencies. He completed a music supervision course at Boston’s Berklee College of Music and, in 2014, launched his own agency, synch2it. He worked on sourcing and licensing music for numerous commercials including Wilkinson Sword's "Hydro 5 Groomer" ad which was nominated at 2015's Music and Sound Awards for Best Sync. He was then approached by Wall to Wall to music supervise their major film production for the BBC, "The Scandalous Lady W", starring Natalie Dormer. Initially broadcast in August 2015, Ariel's work was recognised by winning an award for Best Music at 2016 FIPA. Other TV shows he's music supervised include ITV's "Jekyll & Hyde", Two Brothers Pictures for the BBC, "One of Us" and "In Plain Sight", from award winning World Productions (Line of Duty, Code of Conduct) and Finlaggan. Ariel music supervised feature film, "Money" released in June 2017, winner of 11 film festival awards and directed by Martin Rosete (Tribeca Film Festival Winner). Ariel continues to work on select advertising projects which have included Gucci's "In Bloom" 2017 campaign, two short films directed by Elena Petitti di Roreto for Vogue Italia/Ray-Ban and MyTheresa.com, and Sonia Rykiel's Spring Summer 2018 film directed by Zoe Ghertner. Ariel's worked on the BBC's drama adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's classic novel "Little Women" produced by Playground, premiered at Christmas 2017 and is now working with Roughcut on the new series of "Cuckoo" for the BBC and Netflix.

Naturally marrying creative and business mindsets, he is as comfortable talking music with artists as he is negotiating licenses. Whatever the media, whatever the budget and whatever the time frame, Ariel will secure the perfect score, bring your artistic vision to life and engage your audience in a memorable way. Ariel is a member of the U.K and European Guild of Music Supervisors.

Ariel’s passion and ken for film music and the intricacies of scoring is always impressive. He proved to be an invaluable bank of knowledge for Empire’s huge celebration of the movie soundtrack and continues to be a valued name in my contacts book.